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Wolverine Weapon X: Insane in the Brain

Book Info: This collection contains
Wolverine
issues #10-16.

{3.5/5 stars} (Rounded Up)

"Once upon a time, I believed in such things as heaven and hell. In God. In forever... The thought of dying doesn't scare me... It's the thought of an afterlife I can't bear. Of having to face my husband and father again and tell them of their legacy. And the story of the Red Right Hand. Please, with death let there come only darkness. And let it come for us soon. Let it wash all trace of us from the face of the Earth, so that no one will ever have to know... all the things we have done in the name of revenge."– A Red Right Hand acolyte

In Wolverine's Revenge, Logan at last tracks down and confronts the masterminds behind his recent trials and tribulations – the Red Right Hand. This is a group solemnly dedicated to the destruction of Logan as payback for the pain he has indirectly inflicted upon them as a result of his past exploits through the years – heroic or otherwise. As the story progresses, you get a deeper understanding of what drives the organization, and how their loss has set them on this path toward vengeance.

For the most part, Aaron does a great job crafting sympathetic tales of loss and despair, and the gradual transition to madness is genuinely somewhat unsettling, reminding me a bit of the
Insane in the Brain
arc of
Wolverine: Weapon X
. (That's a good thing, by the way. I loved that one!) I commend Aaron for again telling a fairly imaginative Wolverine story, and it was good enough to convince me to check out
Wolverine Goes to Hell
. And I was glad to find that the same good artist worked on both volumes.

My main problem was that it struck me as ridiculous that such a formidable organization exercised such discipline and planning towards the rather narrow-minded goal of revenge against one man. Just imagine: the plan would take years to conceive, and because there was no guarantee it would work, none of the very many members of this group would achieve any concrete satisfaction until the deed is done. I'm not sure how easy it is for most people to go to such lengths with revenge as their only driving motivation. Sure, one could argue that only the most tenacious of those wronged by Wolverine would be recruited, and that would still yield a pretty impressive following. Of course that makes sense, but even with that and all the other little things I tried to tell myself, this premise just never completely sat well with me, and I instead ended up seeing mostly wasted talent and petty grudges.

Still, even after all the negative stuff I've said, I guess the time between my finishing reading and writing this review has been long enough to reconcile with some of my criticisms. I'm giving this a full four stars, after all – even after initially intending to give it 3 to 3.5. There was some great writing in here, and the ending was also certainly good enough to lend a hand towards my reevaluation. I just hope anyone else with similar issues can put them aside long enough to enjoy this very well-told story.

Subsequent Notes
: I only read issues #15-16 after I wrote this review and realized they too were included in the volume. These were kind of weak, so they ended up dropping the rating by half a star.

Read information about the author

Jason Aaron grew up in a small town in Alabama. His cousin, Gustav Hasford, who wrote the semi-autobiographical novel The Short-Timers, on which the feature film Full Metal Jacket was based, was a large influence on Aaron. Aaron decided he wanted to write comics as a child, and though his father was skeptical when Aaron informed him of this aspiration, his mother took Aaron to drug stores, where he would purchase books from spinner racks, some of which he still owns today.

Aaron's career in comics began in 2001 when he won a Marvel Comics talent search contest with an eight-page Wolverine back-up story script. The story, which was published in Wolverine #175 (June 2002), gave him the opportunity to pitch subsequent ideas to editors.

In 2006, Aaron made a blind submission to DC/Vertigo, who published his first major work, the Vietnam War story The Other Side which was nominated for an Eisner Award for Best Miniseries, and which Aaron regards as the "second time" he broke into the industry.

Following this, Vertigo asked him to pitch other ideas, which led to the series Scalped, a creator-owned series set on the fictional Prairie Rose Indian Reservation and published by DC/Vertigo.

In 2007, Aaron wrote Ripclaw: Pilot Season for Top Cow Productions. Later that year, Marvel editor Axel Alonso, who was impressed by The Other Side and Scalped, hired Aaron to write issues of Wolverine, Black Panther and eventually, an extended run on Ghost Rider that began in April 2008. His continued work on Black Panther also included a tie-in to the company-wide crossover storyline along with a "Secret Invasion" with David Lapham in 2009.

In January 2008, he signed an exclusive contract with Marvel, though it would not affect his work on Scalped. Later that July, he wrote the Penguin issue of The Joker's Asylum.

After a 4-issue stint on Wolverine in 2007, Aaron returned to the character with the ongoing series Wolverine: Weapon X, launched to coincide with the feature film X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Aaron commented, "With Wolverine: Weapon X we'll be trying to mix things up like that from arc to arc, so the first arc is a typical sort of black ops story but the second arc will jump right into the middle of a completely different genre," In 2010, the series was relaunched once again as simply Wolverine. He followed this with his current run on Thor: God of Thunder.